Unified user interface development: the software engineering of universally accessible interactions

Reviewer: Michael Zastre

Savidis and Stephanidis introduce an approach to user interface (UI) design based on unified user interfaces, an approach described as "interaction-specific software of applications or services which are capable of self-adapting to the individual end-user requirements and contexts of use." Here, the adjective "unified" describes the software engineering strategies used to develop user interfaces, or, rather, a more holistic approach toward adapting interfaces to users and their contexts than solely "adapting on the fly." Put another way, the authors argue that the insights available in designing for "adaptability" (interface adaptation before system startup) and "adaptivity" (continuous automatic adaptation of the interface) should be made available from system to system, as opposed to targeted toward one specific (and usually monolithic) UI architecture. After a brief introduction, the second section of the paper describes the authors' "unified" concept, and then goes on to list related work from the perspective of the ways in which interfaces may adapt to users. Section 4 details the development procedure for creating unified user interfaces, along with a software architecture to support the fruits of the development process, and an actual implementation of the authors' ideas in the Avanti Web browser. Development highlights and discussions are found in the concluding sections. This paper is rather difficult to read, as one might glean from the fragment quoted in the first sentence of this review; hopefully the authors have prepared alternate versions for practitioners. Perhaps the text would be easier to understand for those already involved in human-computer interaction (HCI) research, but those with a casual interest in HCI architectures who think they might be interested in the approach proposed by the authors should find a different treatment of this material (these readers should visit the authors' Web site at http://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/). Online Computing Reviews Service